Classroom Activities
"How to Increase Voter Turnout Activity"
Objective: Students will explore ways to increase American voter turn out by coming up with creative ideas to do so, and research how they would be implemented.
Summary: After discussing why voter turn out is low in the United States, students will discuss ideas to increase voter participation and turnout. Students will discuss what would need to happen for the idea to achieve the goal, and research on the Internet, how they would carry out the plan to achieve those goals.
"Deliberative Polling Activity"
Objective: Students will use deliberative polling to analyze that if after students discussed a topic of which a vote is being cast, they felt positive about the results of the ballot.
Summary: Students will cast an initial vote on a topic that they do not know much about. Students will then be asked on a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being the most, how much they were happy with the outcome of the vote. Then students will read research on the topic that they had just voted on, and have a group of fellow students debate the issues of the vote in front of them. Students will recast their ballot and recast their satisfaction vote. Votes will be tabulated and presented to the class for analysis. We will discuss the results and how deliberative polling and Fishkin's research can lead to more informed, satisfied voters based on the deliberative polling strategy.
"How to Calculate who won Activity"
Objective: This activity will give students a brief idea of different ways of tabulating votes to calculate the winner. Students will analyze which system they feel is the most accurate and democratic.
Summary: Students will participate in an activity that will get students up and moving around and they will record observations and comments. We will be deciding where we would go for lunch. The choices will be three different places. First past post, in which when the final tally is counted, no one choice has a majority of the votes, so the winner is the choice with the most votes. Students will decide if it is fair that the majority of the people did not choose the winner. Majority system is where the one with more then 50% of the votes. If no one choice has that, a majority with coalition, or a compromise between the second and third choices is made so they form a majority. This systems shows that minority groups banded together to form a majority. A proportional vote where each restaurant is visited the proportionate amount of times its vote receives. Lastly we will use a rank order system vote, where student's choices would be ranked and even if they did not get their first choice, their vote would be given to their second choice. After the class has completed all the processes, we will compare and contrast them to determine if one system is better than another or if they are all equal in their differences.
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